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G n' R appetite turns 20!
July 31, 2007Guns n' Roses' "appetite for destruction," one of the greatest rock albums ever made, turned 20 years old earlier in July.
I just got my new Rolling Stone magazine with all the intimate details of the band that lasted about 10 years max and about that recording.
They broke up...Axl Rose kept the G n' R name and the rest of the band formed Velvet Revolver a couple of years ago with the Stone Temple Pilots frontman...
I still have a little man-love in my heart for Slash (formerly known as Saul Hudson).
But one of the more interesting facts revealed in the article is the over-dubbing of a sex scene with the performers being Axl Rose and the then drummer's girlfriend Adriana Smith. The drummer Steven Alder cheated on her and she wanted to get back at him. Why not sleep with the lead singer? The recording ended up on the album's final song "Rocket Queen."
How juicy, and sexy?
Axl and his Roses were the cream of the crop during the death of hair metal. Most were heroin/cocaine addicts, and they all partied hardy. I suggest buying the magazine to get the good stuff.
Another interesting fact - they are one of the last groups to record an album with the vision of it going straight to vinyl. They wanted to capture that ballsy sound of Led Zeppelin and other "heavy bands." Nothing about the album was digitally recorded. It was a time when razorblades were used to assist the recording process.
20 years later you realize how great an album like that was. I was only 5 in 1987, when the album came out, but I was old enough to be amazed when I heard Guns N' Roses on the Terminator 2 movie. When John Connor and the kid from Nickelodeon's "Salute Your Shorts" (Danny Cooksey) were riding on the dirtbike, going to the mall.
I bought the album in my teens and I remember listening to it on the ride home with the family. I was amazed because the linear notes had a drawing of a naked chick. That's a big deal for a teenage boy. My dad was offended by the second track "It's so Easy," I think, so he turned it off and handed it back to me.
Axl has one of the those voices. It's high pitched, but it's not falsetto. Slash is amazing, and I just found out that the band hid some of drummer Adler's equipment to simplify his sound before they recorded. Well, it worked.
I wish some folks in their 30s would post a couple of G n' R stories, telling everyone what it was like to buy the album in high school. I can only picture someone with their t-top camaro and their mullet, blasting the album on some sub-standard sound system....
Posted by Clayton Hein at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Comments
OMG! You make me feel so old! I remember listening to the album every single day in the parking lot at high school. Remember, this is the time that they started rating albums and if you were under a certain age, you had to have your parents with you to purchase them. I remember having to record songs from the radio and borrow a friend's tape because there was NO way my parents would have allowed it. And we're talking about the cassette tape in its prime! Anyway, this album enlightened me with with terms such as woofers, subwoofers, tweeters -- all that stuff guys liked to take about in their car stereos. To this day, I can her an GNR song and get my red hair flyin all over the place! My favorite song from the album? Mr. Brownstone. OMG! Surely it's not been 20 years already!
